ABOUT THIS SOFTWARE
Wallpaper Engine enables you to use live wallpapers on your Windows desktop. Various types of wallpaper are supported, including 3D and 2D animations, websites, videos and even certain applications. Choose an existing wallpaper or create your own and share it on Steam Workshop!

Performance
Wallpaper Engine aims to deliver an entertaining experience while using as few system resources as possible. To not distract or hinder you while playing a game or working, you can choose to automatically pause or completely stop the wallpaper while using another application or playing fullscreen (including borderless windowed mode). Various options to tweak quality and performance exist to make Wallpaper Engine suit your needs. As a general rule of thumb, 3D, 2D and video based wallpapers will perform best, while websites and applications will require more resources from your system. Having a dedicated GPU is highly recommended, but not required.

Workshop
The Steam Workshop integration will allow you to share your own wallpapers with the Steam community. Using the Wallpaper Editor, you can create 3D and 2D wallpapers by importing pictures or 3D models and textures. Video, web and application wallpapers are created by simply importing your files into the editor and pushing them to Workshop as a wallpaper. All wallpapers on Workshop are ready-to-use and can either be distributed for free or a price of your choice.

Screenshot

Upadate:

Application Rules

You can now define custom playback behavior for any specific application in various situations. These take priority over the automatic maximized/fullscreen/audio rules.

For example, if you want to use 'Stop' for fullscreen games, but not for your browser, you may add a rule for your browser to make Wallpaper Engine keep playing the wallpapers while your browser is fullscreen, but otherwise stop them while playing:

You can also register screen recording programs to ignore them in Wallpaper Engine's audio detection. This allows you for example to keep Nvidia Instant Replay enabled on the desktop but also let Wallpaper Engine properly mute automatically while other applications are playing audio:

New Effects and Options

The 2D editor has a new multi gizmo that combines position, rotation and size of an object into one and it's now possible to edit particle control points directly on the wallpaper:

Four new effects have been added as well:

Lightning discharge example: https://streamable.com/ofhq2

There is also a new 'playback rate' option on the right for each particle. This allows you to slow down the rate at which the entire particle is simulated just like in the wallpaper browser:

Wallpaper Browser

Each wallpaper that has parallax allows enabling and disabling the mouse parallax effect now:

Next Patches

The next big content patch will bring a number of playlist features, you can check them out on the roadmap already. This should include time based playlists, probably one of the most requested features right now.

Full changelog

Additions

Added application rules.

Added particle emitter option to only emit one particle max per frame.